Guest Blog: dressCode Data Dashboard
Hear from Toni Scullion, Computing Science teacher and founder of nonprofit charity dressCode.
As a Computing Science teacher and Founder of the charity dressCode I have closely tracked/monitored the Computing Science figures in Scottish schools for a decade. With the launch of the Scottish Government's STEM strategy (2017), I began to be curious about how Computing Science compared with other traditional STEM subjects and began to track the national data for Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Mathematics. The more I looked into the data, the more questions I had about historic data, trends and wider issues that are well known around Computing Science such as recruitment.
This became a passion project of mine and something that helped me gain an in-depth understanding of the landscape of Computing Science in Scotland. As anyone who has ever looked at the national figures for any subject in Scotland will know, for every single subject and every level of qualification this data is in a separate spreadsheet with multiple different tabs. With no data science skills of my own, I was just plugging all this data into one spreadsheet from all the traditional STEM subjects to see how Computing Science compared. I quickly realised that I needed a better way to interact with the data to help answer the questions I had and visualise the story of Computing Science, this is when I reached out to the Scottish Tech Army for help. They have been working on this project for a while now and have created an incredible, full interactive visualisation of the data including the historic data from the late 1980s when Computing Science was first introduced as a subject in Scottish schools. The work that the team of Aba-Sah, Blaga and Eleanor have done is absolutely outstanding and I cannot thank them enough! I am blown away by the professionalism and standard of the team and what they have created. It is beyond what I ever imagined and a complete game changer for monitoring the annual data for Computing Science in terms of uptake, gender gap and teacher demographics, it will no doubt be of interest to those of other traditional STEM subjects as well. Through this project, the team has uncovered many things around Computing Science I was not aware of and not widely discussed. Some alarming trends particularly around Computing Science teacher demographics that appears to be a unique Computing Science problem. Coupled with the knowledge that teacher training for Computing Science is only available at three universities and two of them are in the same city, compared with other traditional STEM subject teacher training courses which are available to study at around seven or eight different universities, the figures from the data are shocking but not surprising.
dressCode is a non-profit charity run in my own time while also working a full-time job, all funds are used to inspire the next generation of pupils into Computing Science with a particular focus on closing the gender gap. We do not have funds that would allow us to get a team of data science experts to work on this project and do not have the skills or knowledge how to complete it ourselves. I am hugely grateful for the Scottish Tech Army, without them we would never be able to get access to subject incredible experts. The amazing team of Aba-Sah, Blaga and Eleanor who are some of the most talented individuals I have met listened and fully understood what my challenge was and have gone above and beyond to create an incredible platform, one that I do not think exists to this level of depth and interactivity anywhere else. This is a project dressCode will maintain and will be hosted on the Digital Technology Education Charter site. I am really looking forward to being able to share this project with anyone to interact with who has an interest in this area.
